I am a mechanical engineer and Six Sigma Black Belt by training, and have come to love the beautiful game in my adult life. I turned to my numerical training after becoming a Seattle Sounders FC and Arsenal supporter in 2009 in the hopes of accelerating my understanding of the new game I loved. I've been writing my own blog for over two years, and have written for such outlets as "The Tomkins Times", "The Transfer Price Index", and Howler Magazine. My goal is to advance the understanding of the English Premier League and Major League Soccer through numerical means.

Soccer Analytics at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference

While the soccer-specific panel was a only a mild improvement over last year, soccer analytics within the Evolution of Sport (EoS) and Research paper competitions did show significant improvements over prior years. Daniel McCaffrey and Kevin Bickart presented on their SyncStrength system in an EoS talk entitled Using Human Biology to Measure Team Performance. Building upon forty years of study on human synchrony within the medical world, McCaffrey and Bickart have built a method for measuring heart rate in both game and practice situations that is then post-processed to give feedback on which teammates are the most in and out of sync with each other during any game moment. Their first two test cases involved basketball and football teams, two sports heavily dependent upon teamwork to achieve the desired outcome. While not necessarily predictive in nature, McCaffrey and Bickart see the tool as a way to assess player’s reactions to each other, a game situation, or a coaching interaction and modify behavior accordingly to achieve greater team synchrony. Their goal is to provide a solution that can identify key times when players are not in sync and match it with video to allow players and coaches to recall what might have caused the player to get out of sync, as well as a real time monitor of synchrony in a game that can be used to adjust coaching or team management strategy.

Perhaps the clearest display of the effect of teamwork on soccer success came in research paper finalist Dr. Geir Jordet’s study of The Hidden Foundation of Field Vision in EPL Soccer Players. Dr. Jordet’s presentation was the prefect display of decomposing the problem he planned to study in a very understandable manner. He started by using high quality video from memorable soccer events to demonstrate exactly what he was studying (as an example, Robin Van Persie’s goal against Liverpool where he looks away from the winger to properly position himself during the winger’s first touch), demonstrated how categorized advanced video data generated the core input to the study, quantified the actual impact more active field vision had on pass completion rates (statistically significant gain for midfielders, less so for forwards), and even tied it to useful youth training regimens to drive improve field vision. Some may look at his paper’s overall conclusion – field vision = better passing – and respond, “Duh!”, but to do so is to engage in analytics snobbery more obsessed with making the rare-but-famous all-in-one breakthrough than the multitude of smaller insights that lead to more questions and build towards real impacts via evolutionary change. Barcelona’s current world-beating side wasn’t built in a day or even year. It’s been a decade long process of training and refinement. In the same vein, the soccer analytics community should be encouraging the incremental-yet-highly-insightful approach taken by Dr. Jordet and others, not looking down on it and calling it “obvious”.

Like many other sports represented at the conference, a good bit of learning occurred in panels about topics not directly related to soccer. Other great panels that offered a good bit of cross application to soccer included the data visualization panel, the injury analytics panel, and even a paper on whether a basketball team should crash the boards or get back on defense after a jump shot or free throw (defender corner kick strategy, anyone?). It’s these forums that have cross application to soccer, the soccer-specific EoS and research paper content, and the number of soccer analytics people at the conference that makes the conference a good value for anyone interested in soccer analytics and an even better value for someone interested in the entirety of sports analytics. They also make me hopeful for further improvement in next year’s soccer-specific panel. My hope is that with some mild changes to the types of panelists invited and the resultant panel’s discussion format, the soccer analytics panel will serve as the crown jewel the wider soccer analytics discussion at the conference deserves.

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